Springsteen has never enlarged upon something so different from the dudes and little pretties of his youth as dead philosophers but at its core his songwriting bears an obvious affinity to existential philosophy - a tradition for thinking about man's active participation in his own life, represented by e. g. Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Thus, Springsteen's best albums have dealt first and foremost with his own existence. And in this context the concept of existence can be taken in a strictly terminological sense (developed by Heidegger) in which it doesn't mean just living, being conscience of something or having feelings. Existence is the taking of a stance towards such passively experienced facts, it is the choosing of one's future self and the interpretation of one's present experiences in and through this choice. The moment of choice drew a lot of attention from Kierkegaard and Heidegger and what Springsteen creates is, very often, nothing but the music of that moment.
One upshot of this is that Springsteen's songwriting is not about expressing emotions: He is not making public what was private, thereby possibly gaining some kind of "relief" and affording his audience the opportunity to do the same by "recognizing" themselves in the song. All these terms designating a kind of mechanical transference of something which stays the same in the process are profoundly misleading, much the same way as the current understanding of Springsteen as a "storyteller" is profoundly misleading. The arch typical Springsteen song (e.g. Thunder Road) isn't aimed at telling you anything or in any other way making some piece of information available. It is not saying things with words but doing things with words - e. g. by proposing, urging, declaring, swearing, or admonishing. Off course, all such speech acts are bound to take place on a background of factual realities and already existing emotions. But the crucial point is that the great Springsteen song isn't just expressing these conditions as they were beforehand but integrates them into a project which is, in its essence, an ethical venture. This is why you don't just recognize yourself and your problems in such a song: The whole thing is about finding a solution to the problems, lifting you up to an ethical stance not given by nature to everybody feeling bad and maybe making you recognize the man you really want to be. The song isn't mirroring a feeling but sets up an ethical paradigm for coping with it.
Another aspect of Springsteen's orientation towards existential decisions is his psychological conservatism. He may hold left-wing views in political matters but when it comes to personal ethics, the basic way to deal with the fact of one's own existence, he is rather oldfahioned. Thus, with the partial exception of his very first records, Springsteen's music has continuously represented the effort to maintain a strong self, i. e. a personality structure where different aspects of the mental life are integrated and reflected in a coherent framework of values. This is no commonplace in an art world where the artist is idolised as a somnambulistic "genius" (in the case of the rock star maybe rather as a "noble savage"), where modernism has accustomed the audience to take an interest in nothing but the new and revolutionary and where the identity of everybody involved is constantly threatened by sex, drugs and musical ecstasy.
The extent to which the narrators in Springsteen's songs succeed in overcoming fragmentation an meaninglessness through faith in their actions and commitments is really at the core of what made this music important to a lot of people. Everything can work as the soundtrack of your life for a period but Springsteen's music has a peculiar tendency to become the soundtrack of your finest hours - those decisive moments when you finally react to some kind of pressure and make up your mind about the line of action to chose. Jean-Paul Sartre made an enormous impact on an earlier generation when he told them that man is "condemned to freedom". What Springsteen has to offer is something quite similar and Dave Marsh seems to hit the mark when he writes: "Springsteen asks of those of us who love his work nothing more and nothing less than he asks of himself. 'What are you going to do about it?'." (Dave Marsh: Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts, Routledge, Great Britain, 2004 - page 677).